Mark Mazower, The Balkans – from the End of Byzantium to the Present Day

This must have been designed for A Level History or Undergraduate studies, it’s such a concise, clear little book. I wanted more, although it’s great as an introduction. A little light reading before embarking on the second part of George Martin’s fantasy epic to please Kev.

Everyone in the family is so ill at the moment. Poor Lib has an ear infection, and keeps sticking her finger in it to make it worse. Added to her insistence on feeding herself and covering everything with toast and pasta sauce she is a messy messy baby. Fred is just very quiet, although Calpol turns him into a Tasmanian Devil for a few hours. When he comes down though, he crashes. A good guide to how well he is feeling is how often sentences still end with ‘smelly socks’. Helen’s had quite enough of it all and made us all go out for fresh air yesterday. Now we all feel worse. . .

It’s put my running back quite a bit, which is very disheartening as I’d just set a new PB for 10K (53 minutes) before this all started. I’ve hardly run now for three weeks, although I do have a cross country 10K on Saturday morning, so hopefully I’ll be fit for that. Need to do sub 2 hours on the Reading Half Marathon on 1^st April. . .

Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith

How embarrassing that I’ve never read this before. It was a much more touching portrait of the self-important Mr Pooter than I’d imagined. Yes, he was a frightful snob, prig and penny-pincher, but he was also gentle, honest and truly loved his family. What a great picture of the English Man. I laughed out loud at some of his humiliations and the cosmic trials sent to test him. Particularly the bootscrape. Freddie is currently finishing every sentence with ‘smelly socks!’ which I probably shouldn’t be encouraging. I’ve tried changing it to ‘stripy socks and chunky chocolate!’, but it’s not taking. His lullabies at the moment are mostly old Pogues songs, with some of the lyrics subtly changed. ‘Misty Morning Albert Bridge’ seems to be a particular favourite, but is very difficult to sing. Libby is not quite walking yet, but is built like a prop forward.

Thomas Penn, The Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England

'He were a dark prince, and infinitely suspicious, and his times full of secret conspiracies and troubles', Sir Francis Bacon

A biography of Henry VII, what an awful money-grabbing man. I was trying to think of an English monarch I liked this morning when I finished reading it, as they’ve nearly all been vicious or venal or lazy or murderous or tyrannical or diseased or debauched, or any combination of the above. The best I could come up with was George III, an awful king who lost America and trampled all over civil liberties, but was a family man at least. Maybe I’m just naïve and missing the point, and you need to be a bastard to be an effective monarch for the Greater Good. It just too often seems to be about the Greater Glory of the monarch for that to be true, though. It is interesting that medieval monarchs managed to combine slaughter and despotism with an intense spirituality and dedication to God. God and Kings, eh? What a recipe for disaster. No wonder no one sings the national anthem other than the swivel-eyed.

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, The Man On The Balcony

Martin Beck was an inspiration for Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbø, and as it’s all about Scandinavian noir at the moment I had to read it. It’s set in the same social democratic Scandinavia with a seedy underbelly and a guilt that the prosperity and liberal policies of the majority haven’t benefited one part of the population at all. It’s nowhere near as bleak or gory as Wallander or Harry Hole, and concentrates on police procedural. I’m gonna have to read more though.

Fred pronounced last night that he was going to dream about horses doing a poo. I’ taking him to the cinema on Saturday for the first time. The new Spielberg Tintin film is showing, and as that’s his choice of reading at the moment, it should keep him entertained. No doubt I’ll be bristling with rage with the liberties taken, the uncanonical nature of the work and why Belgians have American accents, but that’s because I’m an arse.

Harry Thompson, Tintin: Hergé and His Creation

I’m sure I’ve read this before, but maybe it’s just going over familiar ground. Freddie likes to have a Tintin or Asterix story at bedtime, and his cousin Ciara is a fan at the moment, so I lugged all the books down from the loft last week. It’s tough going reading the stories to Fred, as you can’t really just do the dialogue to explain what’s happening, so I have to try and summarise each part. A lack of imagination on my part means this often becomes ‘Tintin is chasing the bad men, but then Captain Haddock falls over and goes bash! And then Thompson and Thomson bash into each other!’ Roll on the day when he can read them for himself. Apparently T & T can be told apart, as Thomson’s moustache flares out a little bit at the bottom

George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones, Book One of A Song of Ice and Fire

Kev bought this for me as a Christmas present, as he and Steve have read the whole series and loved them. This was surprising, as this is the same Kev who gave up Sawyer Family Book Club, the highlight of my monthly social calendar, because he didn’t have time to read. HBO made a TV version recently, but it’s been shown on Sky, so it’s off-limits given my boycott of all things Murdoch. The DVD is out in the Spring, so I’ll get it then. This does appear to be a bit of a golden age for TV drama – we’ve just finished the second series of The Killing, which has mildly obsessed every Guardian reader, all of whom are now convinced they can speak Danish. We went to see Gaby and Pete a few weeks ago for a Nordic-themed evening, and Pete had a Birk Larsen removals t-shirt which I coveted greatly.

Libby’s walking hasn’t advanced much since the café at the swimming pool, but the poor love has a cold at the moment and is just a big ball of snot and porridge. Freddie is learning French at Nursery, but tends to get exasperated when we try and encourage it. Yesterday when I tried to converse with him in French, he just sighed and said ‘But Daddy, we’re not French!’ Looks like we’ll be raising a monoglot.

Miklós Bánffy, The Phoenix Land

I bought this book because I liked the front cover, which features that map of the old Kingdom of Hungary, incorporating Croatia, Slovakia, Transylvania and all the other bits of neighbouring countries which some Hungarians still apparently consider to be Hungarian. It always chills me a little bit, and acts as a reminder that there is unfinished business in that part of the world. It's the memoirs of a Hungarian Count who was a bitpart player in European diplomacy in the aftermath of the First World War, and saw the Habsburg world he knew collapse. He's well-known as the author of a trilogy set in the same period, although in my ignorance I'd never heard of them. I've asked Cathy if they are worth reading.
It's been a long time since I last wrote, and I'm conscious that I've recorded very little of Libby's first year in comparison to Fred's, so hopefully I'll be able to keep it up this time. Libby stood up unaided and took her first steps on Saturday, in the glamorous surroundings of the Café at Woking Leisure Centre. She's giving Helen a hard time at the moment, often waking up in the night and taking hours to settle. Helen isn't ready to let Libby learn to get herself to sleep yet, so she has to hold her. I look after Freddie's bedtime, which now consists of a story and a lullaby. The lullaby comes from a lyric sheet I put together which contains Lloyd Cole, Belle & Sebastian, Madness, Simon & Garfunkel, the Kinks, Emily Barker. Right now my favourite is Bright Phoebus, which Fred joins in on, 'For the very first time'. Up until recently, Fred had a choice of two lullabies, as there are so few songs I both know the words to and can reach the required notes! The choice was either The Bony King of Nowhere from Bagpuss or the wonderful One Spring Morning. Fred now knows the words to both, and after so much practice I'm very nearly in tune. My version of 'The Only Living Boy in New York' however, is hideous